It’s been a long time coming, but Facebook graph search has now been rolled out for the majority of English speaking users of Facebook, enabling users to tap into the masses of data that Facebook has been collecting over the past few years.

Graph Search is Facebook’s way of letting users easily search for other users, pages or companies based on their previous actions such as checking into a local business or liking a musician’s page.

The search itself is based on natural language processing, where the user can type in a natural sounding phrase such as “People who like Rock music and who live in London” and Facebook will understand the context of the search query and yield the correct results. It works by identifying keywords within the search term and returning a list of people who, in this instance, like Rock music and live in London.

With the power to find people based on their age, location, activities, interests and more, it opens up a new tool for market researchers to use when assessing how much demand there is for a product or service.

Take this example, searching “People who like Coffee Shops who live in Brighton” yields a large list of users who are quite likely to be visitors of such businesses, and from here you can dive deep into their interests and where else they’ve checked in.

What can we do with this information?

As well as being a good tool for discovering new markets, we can use it for finding out more about the products and services we already provide. By running search terms that’ll find people who both like you and your competitors, you can find people who have a clear interest in what you do.

It even turns into a powerful networking tool. If we run a search query for “People who live in Brighton and like Bozboz and Wired Sussex” we get a list of what appears to be largely digital marketing professionals who live in Brighton, as Wired Sussex are a digital marketing recruitment site and Bozboz are a digital agency.

The customer’s perspective

Facebook Graph Search gives users a chance to discover new businesses. It enables them to perform search terms such as “Restaurants nearby that my friends visited” to get an idea of their friend’s favourite restaurants in the area.

We’re positive that this will open up a whole new world of SEO, as businesses try to refine their Facebook strategies to increase engagement to rank higher on Graph Search results. Even though the most influential ranking factors are still unclear, it’s worth setting up a Facebook page for your business if you haven’t already.

Encourage your visitors to interact with your page by checking in to your business, liking your page or leaving a review as this will give visitors to your page a much better insight to your business offerings.


By Guy Andrews, Search and Social Media Assistant at www.bozboz.co.uk

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